WombatNation

Today is the last day of the KALX 2004 fundraiser, so please call in your donation, now, to (510) 642-5259. They don’t have on-line forms, yet, but you can print out a form and mail it in.

Check out the designs for the KALX-branded merchandise. I’ve already gotten my t-shirt, and I assure you that every wardrobe is greatly improved by having at least one chocolate brown t-shirt. The shoulder bag is also great. It has a couple zippered pouches and is the ideal size for record collectors. For those of you under 30, records would be those large, round, usually black, vinyl discs that you may have seen in the movie High Fidelity. And, finally, who would dare to show up at the voting booth not wearing a “Don’t blame me, I voted for KALX” button?

Disclaimer: My wife is the general manager of KALX. However, I donated in excess of the amount of money required to be entitled to the KALX schwag that I received.

Congratulations to a former colleague, Wojciech Matusik, for being named to Technology Review’s list of 100 top young innovators. I wish I could link directly to the article, but you have to either pay to access the articles or have a paid subscription. The article was in the October 2004 issue.

I hired Wojciech in 1997 when I was at Mosaix. He stayed with us for about a year, before leaving to get a Master’s, and then Ph. D., at MIT. While he missed out on the rollercoaster ride following the Lucent acquisition, I think he clearly made the right decision. He’s now doing research work in the areas of 3-D TV and 3-D photo and video systems.

When I bought my wife a Titanium PowerBook nearly two years ago, I knew in advance that WiFi range was a significant drawback. The Apple Airport card sits below the keyboard and the Titanium shell acts entirely too much like a Faraday cage. After suffering through some Linksys-induced misery, I bought a NetGear wireless router. That made things significantly better, but the reception in the living room left a lot to be desired and the transfer speed still sucked.

One NetGear WG511T 108 Mbps Wireless PC Card (purchased on sale at Amazon for $50) and one copy of OrangeWare Wireless Driver for Mac ($15) later, I’m in heaven.

The range with the NetGear card is vastly improved over the Apple Airport card, and the speed boost is amazing. Not only was I able to switch my NetGear router from 802.11b to 802.11g, but I was also able to take advantage of the TurboG feature of the Atheros chips in the router and the card. Of course, most of the speed boost is just from having decent signal strength in the living room.

The OrangeWare Wireless Driver for Mac was everything it was advertised to be. Within five minutes of starting the download, I had installed the software, configured it and was browsing the web from the living room at speeds indistinguishable from the wired connection on my PC back in the office. After confirming that everything was working, I gladly clicked the Register button and paid for it.

Using the Speed Meter at 2wire.com, I was averaging 2.81 Mbps on the PowerBook when in the room with the router and 2.77 Mbps from the living room. We’ll have to see what happens once I add the new laptop, which has an Intel PRO/Wireless 2200 card, to the network.

Earlier this year, my 15-year old 26″ JVC TV started showing its age. About twenty scan lines into the image, about five scan lines would be skipped. The top of the image would shift down to fill the gap, showing the scan lines that normally aren’t visible due to the fact that all CRT-based televisions overscan the screen slightly so that you don’t see black borders. Even worse than missing lines was the fact that periodically the lines would reappear, causing the top part of the image to shift up and down in a very annoying way. The problem usually appeared only after the TV had been on for at least 30 minutes, so it was likely some thermal problem with a transformer. Given the age of the TV, I decided it wasn’t worth fixing.

Being a moderate gadget freak, this struck me as the perfect opportunity to buy a big-screen HD-capable TV. At about the same time, Intel announced that they were planning to release a new LCoS chip later in the year that would drive the cost of big screen TVs down to the $1000-2000 range. So, I settled in for the long wait.

Of course, I continued to do research,and I eventually decided that a DLP chip-based TV would also be an excellent solution. The Samsung HLN437W had a lot of good reviews and it was the perfect size for my living room and the piece of furniture in which it would be housed. Then I found one for a very good price at Magnolia Hi-Fi. I decided not to wait on Intel, and I went ahead and bought the Samsung. Not waiting on Intel turned out to be a good decision, as they announced this week that they were
cancelling their LCoS plans.

For the most part, I’ve been very happy with the Samsung HLN437W. The initial reviews on Amazon were pretty good, though a lot of negative ones have appeared lately.

The only times I’ve had issues with the Samsung have been when the ambient temperature of the room rises above about 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Though Oakland’s climate is very temperate, we do get a couple weeks each year where outside temps hit the upper 80’s or the 90’s. Since this doesn’t happen often enough during the year, my house, like many others here, doesn’t have an air conditioning unit. Due to the big windows on the south side of the house, the inside temperature often hits the mid to upper 80’s when it’s very hot outside. If the global warming trend continues, though, I expect even more toasty hot days in the coming years.

The two heat-related problems are that the TV sometimes takes a very long time to turn on (up to ten minutes, or even longer) and the audio and video get out-of-sync. The first problem is obviously the worst, since the TV is pretty useless if it won’t show an image. The second problem is not as bad as it sounds, at least for the kinds of things I watch. A very large amount of my TV viewing consists of soccer matches. Thankfully, you rarely see the announcers, so I usually can’t even tell if the sync problem is occurring. I mainly notice the problem when watching movies with a lot of close-up dialog. The reason I think it is heat-related is that the problem seems worst on hot days, and the magnitude of out-of-syncness seems to increase the longer the TV is on. One of the movies I TiVo’d was Destroy All Monsters, which I’ve saved for a hot day, just to watch the double effect.

I’ve yet to observe any of the other problems people have observed with DLP TVs, such as the rainbow effect or loud whining noises. One thing to be aware of, though, is that while the horizontal viewing angle is quite good, the vertical viewing angle is not so great. Since the bottom of the TV is currently about a foot above my head (and across the room, of course), the screen is not as bright as if I were standing up. From the floor, the screen looks very dim. Going left to right, though, I’m amazed how good the screen looks at sharp angles. The matte surface of the screen also does a great job of diminishing reflections. That was something that really bugs me about CRTs and most of the other DLP TVs (the RCA Scenium, in particular) that I looked at.

I had already planned to get a portable air conditioner, but the purchase has now gained a bit more urgency. It’s never pleasant when you come home from work to a house at 88 degrees F, knowing that it will take a couple hours, assuming there is a breeze outside, for the temperature to get back down to the 70’s. The cats aren’t too excited about the heat, either.

So, here’s an advance stock investment tip for the spring - buy shares in companies that manufacture portable air conditioning units.

A great article on Voxify appeared in the East Bay Business Times this week. In addition to providing some interesting background on the company founders, page three of the article provides a good description of what we do.

In short, we design and build speech recognition applications that enable automated customer service solutions for clients in the travel, hospitality, and retail markets. On the technical side, we’ve built a really powerful speech applications platform on top of VoiceXML browsers and J2EE servers that lets us quickly build highly conversational speech applications. The platform we’ve built models the behaviors of the best call center agents. The article does a pretty good job of capturing the areas where I think we provide a lot more value than our competitors.

So, if for some reason you were wondering what I’m doing these days to pay my website hosting fees, check it out.

FCC Chairman Michael Powell continues to behave in a startling reasonable way when he announced that he will seek federal control over VoIP regulation. The IP telephony industry is definitely taking off and I think it would be a shame if the small, innovative companies that have jump started the whole thing were to get mired in regulation that varies widely from state to state. That would be a clear invite for the big players with their armies of lawyers to sweep in and begin to stake out new monopolies.

I think this step counts as fulfilling item 10 on Voxilla’s top ten predictions for VoIP in 2004 - FCC steps in on regulation. Also, I still stand by my belief that this is not a bad thing.

I just noticed an article on Ars Technica about a $750 discount on Dell Inspiron laptops priced at $1500 or more. Fortunately, I saw a notice about the sale in the RSS feed for More Stuff 4 Less Bargain Blog Monday. I also spotted it at TechBargains.com. The sale started at 4 a.m. Pacific Tuesday morning. When Dell has offered discounts like this before (though I’ve never heard of a discount this large), they usually have a limited number of machines they want to sell. When they’re gone, the sale is over, even if that means it lasts only a couple hours.

Monday night I priced out an Inspiron 8600 exactly as I wanted it, at least at their prices. Without tossing in gratuitous features, it came to about $1650. After adding taxes and then taking the $750 discount (the $49 shipping charge will be covered by a rebate), the total came to just under $1000. I leapt out of bed at 7 a.m. on Tuesday, hoping that was early enough, tweaked the configuration a bit, and ordered it.

The laptop is scheduled to ship on October 27. I’m thinking it will come even earlier. The Dell site shows it has reached the testing stage. All that is left is boxing. Fortunately, it survived the kitting stage, which for a second, I though might be a kilting stage. I have a Scottish surname, but I really don’t need to have my computers delivered to me swathed in kilts.

Since I decided to get the ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 PRO video card, I first had to make sure there was a Linux driver for it. Specifically, I needed a 2.6 kernel driver, since I will probably install Fedora Core 2, though Debian is a dark horse candidate. More likely, though, I would switch my Dell desktop from FC2 to Debian and start using it more as a server. ATI is still working on 2.6 kernel support, but fortunately I found a thread at FedoraForum that tells you how to get it to work.

I plan to leave a 10 GB Windows partition for when I absolutely have to run Windows apps, but mainly, this will be a Linux laptop. I’m really hoping that power management in the 2.6 kernel was as much improved as people have claimed it is. I will definitely be reading through the laptop forum at FedoraForum this week.

The Ars Technica article mentions that eBay was flooded with Dell laptops today that people are probably trying to flip for a quick couple hundred bucks. I actually though about doing that on Craig’s List. I saw a bunch of laptops for sale in the $900-1000 range that are nowhere close to as nice as the machine I just bought. But, I finally decided I wanted to keep it too much. Even if I made a couple hundred on the sale, I would probably have to spend that much extra to find another laptop of similar quality and features.

I still have a few more things to get for the new laptop. I’m going to buy a 60 GB 7200 RPM drive (~$120 on sale) to replace the 40 GB drive it will come with. Then, I will buy a USB notebook drive enclosure ($20-40) to hold the 40 GB drive. For about the price of upgrading to the same 60 GB drive from Dell, I will also get a 40 GB USB drive that I can use to easily and quickly move files between the laptop, my desktop, the PowerBook, and my desktop at work. Thanks for the tip, Raghu!

Also, I got the laptop with just 512 MB in one DIMM. I’m confident I can find a 1 GB DIMM to add to it for much less than Dell was charging.

Even though I migrated from Movable Type to WordPress quite a while ago, I still planned to post some tips on fighting spam comments on a Movable Type blog. Well, no need for me to write that article, because Elise has already done a far better job than I would have done. If you use Movable Type, you need to read that post and take action on it as soon as possible.

Even if you don’t use MT, there are some good tips to learn from. Yet another item on my ToDo list was to try to limit the amount of spam referrals I’ve been getting in my referer [sic] logs. Nobody sees the spam referrals but me, but they crowd out meaningful info from my website reports. Elise provides an example for blocking spam referrals via a simple modification to the .htaccess file at the root of your website. It’s a manual shotgun approach, but at least I can use it to eliminate the most flagrant repeat offenders.

Neil Harrison and James Coplien’s book Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development was released this summer and was reviewed today on Slashdot. I worked with Neil at Avaya, and I can attest that he was one of the many smart men and women with whom I worked during my tenure there. Neil was very knowledgeable and reasonable and was a great guy to discuss software architecture and methodologies with. He wasn’t easily seduced by the latest, greatest silver bullet, but he wasn’t tied down to the “way we’ve always done it”, either.

“Architect Also Implements” was a pattern he strongly advocated to the product groups. In a really big company, though, that can be very tough for an architect to pull off. When you have hundreds, or even thousands, of developers building products, you can reap a significant benefit from having a group of people review the designs and implementations to hopefully ensure that it’s all going to work together well in the end. In addition, as an architect gains more and more competence and experience with a company’s products, he or she becomes the best candidate to review designs for cross group compatibility and reuse. Before you know it, your best architects are spending all their time just trying to keep up with what big packs of developers are working on. One of the many great things about my move to Voxify has been that I’ve gotten the chance to be an architect who also implements.

The review on Slashdot points out that the authors were not too kind to ISO 9000. That’s very interesting, because Avaya is ISO 9000 certified. I shudder when I think of the horrors of the certification process and the amount of time blown on audits. Fortunately, I never lost too much time to the audits, because I did everything I could to avoid getting sucked into their time-wasting vortex.

ISO certification is a pointless activity for all but the most disorganized software development organizations. If anyone out there thinks that buying software only from ISO 9000 certified companies is going to ensure that they receive high quality products, they need to think again. Certification ensures only that the vendor is willing to make its employees spend large amounts of time filling out overly generalized (but in line with the mind-withering, approved process) forms, instead of spending time developing innovative, high quality products. The day that I see that one of my company’s competitors has become ISO certified will be the day that I know we have one less viable competitor.

Oh, and did I mention that I think ISO certification is a bad idea for software development organzations?

Anyway, based on the Slashdot review, the reviews on Amazon, other articles and books I have read by Coplien or Harrison, and my personal experience working with Neil, I can strongly recommend Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development to any person who is serious about software development as a profession. And, yes, I do plan to buy it and read it, but I currently have way too many books in my queue.

Whatever you thought this post would be about, given the title, you’re probably wrong.

When I’m out on my bike, I always wonder about the spray-painted words and lines on the street. One of the most common, and yet most mysterious, scrawlings was “USA”. Often, I see “USA” painted on the street next to an arrow. It seemed as if I had somehow been re-located just outside of the country temporarily, but if I would only cross the street, I could regain my ability to vote using a faulty device manufactured by Diebold.

After seeing “USA” many times near manhole covers, I decided that it must mean Underground Sewer Access. That was never a satisfying answer, though, since spray-painted letters on the asphalt seemed like such a crude way to identify sewer entrances. Well, a short article in last September’s Wired on
Urban Markup Language has set me straight. USA is actually an abbreviation for Underground Service Alert.

And the color of the paint doesn’t happen to indicate what was on sale at Home Depot. Or at least usually not. Red means power lines, yellow is for oil or gas, blue is for fresh water, green is for sewage, purple is for reclaimed water, and orange is for communications or cable lines.